Daniel Nashed's Blog

Domino Start Script Diagnostic Improvements

Some of the following additions made it already into an earlier version.
I actually started after Engage. During Engage I had a server hang and had to run, download and analyze NSDs from the hotel room.
This did lead to the first diagnostic additions.

• NSDs are now at your fingertips. You can open the latest NSD and see when it was created.
• If you have nshmailx installed, you can send NSDs directly by mail (independent from Domino with the small helper tool via SMTPS).
• Today I added disk space information reading the translog, DAOS, FT and NIF settings from notes.ini. This was a missing part, which needed some thought which disks to show.

Domino process explorer

But on top of this I added a Domino process explorer to more interactively look into Domino processes, without creating a NSD.
I added this mainly for my own diagnostic and performance troubleshooting.
You can interactively pick processes, dump processes or just single threads in fast sequence -- including auto refresh from 1-9 seconds.
In addition you can toggle on/off interactively logging those stacks to a file.
It's using the GNU debugger (gdb) in a similar way NSD uses it.

New interactive navigation model

The interactive selection of processes is a new menu navigation model I am trying out.
This includes cursor up/down, selecting via "enter" and ESC to go back
It needs some tricks to put the session into raw mode for the time of the menu operations to read the extended keys (up/down cursor and ESC).

There are more details to discover. I am still working on details.
I have submitted the changes to the Domino Start Script and the Domino Container project in parallel.
This means the new script and the enhancements are already available in the container environment as well if you switch to the development branch.
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Some of the changes are really targeted to the very senior admins to analyze problems.
But over all the diagnostic enhancements are benefiting everyone.
I added some of this for my own needs (helping customers to troubleshoot) and there is more coming.
What I would really like to do is semaphore annotation.
But this needs changes either in Domino, or I would need to provide an add-on annotation tool to annotate the semaphore time.

Let me know if this is helpful and what might be missing.

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